


Here there be monsters

by lilacpink



Category: Vampire: The Masquerade
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-18
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-10-11 16:22:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17450312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacpink/pseuds/lilacpink
Summary: This is a story about Vampires. But a human got caught up in it.Or Chloe's side of Epilogue 1/Episode 9."I could feel my entire world shifting as I traced each letter one by one, but, for some strange reason, it didn’t feel confusing. Instead, I felt like it suddenly clicked into its proper place. The place it was removed from five years ago."





	Here there be monsters

**Author's Note:**

> First and foremost, thank you for taking an interest in my fanfiction!  
> Second: I must apologize beforehand for any gruesome grammar mistakes and any unintelligible phrases. English is not my first language, so writing in it is quite the challenge for me.  
> Third: A headcanon. I don’t know how long college usually lasts in the USA, but here in Brazil it’s hardly ever more than 5 years (except for Med School, of course). So my headcanon is that Chloe is one year younger than Jasper and that he “died” in his first year of college, while she was still in school. And that’s why 5 years later she is still in college. Not sure if that checks out, but I’m going with it.  
> Fourth: the fanfiction itself. It began when I read a beautiful fanfiction (Unnoticed: Jasper's Epilogue by Falt, that you can find here https://archiveofourown.org/works/16806829 and should definetively read ), exploring Jasper’s thoughts during that heartbreaking scene in Epilogue 1, and I was inspired to write Chloe’s side of the story. Before I knew it, I was extending it past the scene itself and into her whole experience with the loss of Jasper. As we’ve only just met Chloe, I took some liberties with her background. Ok, a lot of liberties. But I tried to remain loyal to what we’ve seen in her brief appearance. I had a great time trying imagine what makes her tick and this is the result of my endeavours.  
> Fifth and las, but not least: I hope you all like it!

**Here there be monsters**

 

Almost everybody remembers what they were doing when the news about 9/11 broke out. Psychologists call it a flashbulb memory, because it’s as though the emotions prompted by an event of that magnitude shine such a searing light in your head that the memory of the moment is burned into your brain like a photograph.

I was five years old then, so, of course, the tragedy and the horror of it all escaped me. But I do remember my mom frozen in front of the TV, hands clasped over her mouth. Never had I seen such a look on her face. That night, our family prayed for the families of those who had perished and thanked God for guarding our lives and keeping us safe. Until then, I had never thought about thanking God for keeping me alive. It seemed like a strange thing to do, really. Mom said He was the one gave me my life, why would He take it away?

But, somehow, death became a regular part of my life after that. My grandmother passed away when I was seven, my dog died when I was ten, another relative succumbed to cancer not three years after that. I mourned along with my family, but my mom would never allow us to grief for too long. She would do her best to console us by saying that death was part of God’s plan for every living being, as it was His wish that everything would one day return to Him. Later, as a teenager, I would question whether or not I actually believed in God, at least in the way He was depicted by the church, all stern rules and black and white morals, but still the notion of death as a natural part of life was engraved in some essential part of me.

I met Jasper in high school, after my family moved from Maine to California. Try as I might, I can’t remember exactly how we met. I can’t remember the first time I saw him or what was the first thing he ever said to me. Suddenly he was there and he had a mischievous smile that had my knees buckling and I was hoping really hard he’d hold my hand at the movies. Suddenly all the romantic stories I wrote were about him and all I wanted from life was to travel the world with him and grow old by his side, but I couldn’t remember how it all started.

And yet I do remember exactly what I was doing when his mom told me he was missing. I was in my room, doing my biology homework and listening to Galaxies by Owl City. It was saturday. About 02:30 PM. I was mildly annoyed that Jasper hadn’t texted me since the night before. I had just picked up my phone to try to call him again when it rang with his mom’s name flashing on the screen.

“Jasper’s missing. He didn’t go back to his dormitory yesterday,” she had sobbed and gasped in my ear. “No one’s seen him.”

It was my very own 9/11.

  


Life was never the same after that. Much like some historians consider 9/11 to be the actual beginning of the 21st century, Jasper’s death was the beginning of my adult life.

I attended his funeral almost in a daze, as though I was part of a low-budget VR experience. I hugged his sobbing mother, accepted the condolences of all our friends and even proclaimed an eulogy for him in front of the tearful assembly. But my mind refused to fully acknowledge the situation. Something was terribly wrong, I kept thinking, but what was it? What was this strange, unformed thought that kept waltzing in and out of my head, out of my reach before I could fully comprehend it? Thinking about it hurt like red-hot iron pressing against the insides of my head. So I tried not to.

Instead, I stared into Jasper’s smile in the photograph beside the empty coffin and focused instead in my own life. It was very strange to think that, like him, I could be there one moment and gone in the next. I’ve always accepted death as an inevitable part of the circle of life, but never had I fully realized that it could happen to _me_ at any moment. There were so many things I wanted to do before I too vanished without a trace. So I decided it was time go out and do them.

I applied for Griffith College and started moving towards my newest goal: to become a journalist. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to fix every problem in world by myself, but as a journalist I could hope to expose said problems and thus encourage other people to work together for a solution. And that was my greatest intent: to help people. That was the best thing one could hope to accomplish in this fleeting life. No one deserved to live in poverty, in anguish or in pain. So I worked extra hard on my classes and took every chance I could to get closer to my objective: from participating in workshops on _campus_ to sending articles to small magazines. Meanwhile, I took part in all sorts of charity works, serving soup to the homeless and volunteering at the local dog shelter. Because, of course, I couldn’t wait for graduation when already there were things could do to help the less fortunate. There was no time to waste.

Dating, on the other hand, was not a priority for me. In fact it was very low on my list of preferred things to do, right next to laundry and taxes. All attempts I made, usually on Diane’s insistence, failed most spectacularly. It seemed I was always longing for things those poor, unsuspecting guys couldn’t give me. One of them was too short. The other didn’t have a sense of humor. Another couldn’t miss a single Sour Sugar performance. There was even one I disliked simply because he looked very weird in a hoodie. “Self-sabotage,” Diane said and I always pretended to be outraged.

As for Jasper, he never seemed to leave my mind. He was there in everything I did, especially in the first months. If I listened to a new song, I knew if he would’ve liked it or not. I tried to imagine his comments on my articles or the proud look on his face when one of them got the first page. Every time I got dressed, I still wondered if he would’ve thought me pretty.

My mind kept circling back to his death, like a moth attracted to a flame, but I couldn’t say why. I had never been this affected before. Dying was simply an occupational hazard of living, I had always told myself. It was the natural order of things. And yet I wondered and wondered, reliving every moment and analyzing all possible angles. The cops telling his mom that he was dead, even though no body was ever found. No leads on the killer. No idea on the motive. Just a young man who seemed to have vanished out of thin air. Thinking about those things had thousands of warning lights flashings in my head. Whenever those thoughts came, I rushed out of my apartment and into the streets, looking for a story, for something interesting to put on paper. Something that would occupy me long enough until the shivers stopped.

With time, however, the memory of Jasper himself grew fainter in my mind. After a year I could no longer remember the sound of his voice or the precise shade of brown of his eyes. Two years and I could no longer remember if he liked impressionist paintings or hated them. On the third year, my days with him started to feel like a dream I once had or a movie I’ve seen a long time ago, but couldn’t remember the details. No matter how much I tried to cling to them (and I did), they kept escaping like water slipping through fingers.The only thing that was always there, sharp and vivid, was the memory of the day he disappeared.

Until I got the note.

  


As I stared at the napkin in my hands, I felt myself tremble like a recently rang church bell. Suddenly everything about Jasper came crashing back into me like a tidal wave and the seer force of it nearly knocked me to the floor. His deep laughter and the way he inclined himself slightly in my direction whenever I spoke, because he was so much taller than me. How he’d smile briefly to himself before saying something funny. The huskiness in his voice when he said my name, his eyes glinting with mystery and passion, and how he kissed me until I was out of breath. The way his long fingers held a pen and the angle on his “n”s, the dots on his “i”s and all the other letters which now seemed to glare at me from the paper.

The reasonable part of me, the one that reminded me once in while that five years was a long time to be in love with a dead boy, had me agreeing with Diane. Yes, it was about time I moved on and if meeting the parents of a guy with too many muscles was the way to do it, so be it. That same reasonable part also whispered that I should tear the note apart and disregard it as a bad joke, but I didn’t listen to it. Instead, I found myself carefully folding the napkin and sliding it into my pocket.

Once I got home, I tried to throw it away, but my hands kept moving on its own accord, unfolding the paper and opening it up in front of my eyes. I stared at it until the letters seemed to float in front of my closed eyes, burned into my eyelids.

I could be mistaken, I kept telling myself. It had been five years after all. Maybe I was simply seeing what I wanted to see.

There was only one way to find out.

Inside a cardboard box covered in flowery gift wrapper, I preserved memories of what seemed like a past life. The diaries I kept during high school, old photographs, a gold dodgeball medal. In the very bottom, there was a red envelope containing a simple valentine’s day card.

_Nothing will keep us apart. Love, Jasper._

I could feel my entire world shifting as I traced each letter one by one, but for some strange reason it didn’t feel confusing. Instead, I felt like it suddenly clicked into its proper place. The place it was removed from five years ago.

Death was a part of life, but Jasper had never been dead.

I think I’ve known it all along. The thought had danced on the edges of my consciousness, never visible, never tangible, but always there, ready to send shivers down my spine at the mention of his name. I had always felt the truth circling like a bird of prey, eager for a chance to feast on my sanity. Because it was a maddeningly terrifying thought.

He was alive, but something was keeping him from coming back to me. And whatever that was, it was dark and dangerous. Because I knew nothing less the armies of hell itself would have stopped him.

  
  


On the topic of 9/11, conspiracy theories always abound. As an incurably curious aspiring journalist, I was familiar with a good number of them. Most were ridiculous and far-fetched (but arguably good ice-breakers at journalism gatherings). Others weren’t so amusing and had my stomach clenching uncomfortably.

It seemed only fitting for my very own 9/11 to have its very own conspiracy theory. Of the stomach-clenching variety.

I felt dizzy with anxious excitement, and yet, oddly satisfied. The urgency, the restlessness that seemed to bubble like boiling liquid inside of me for the past five years didn’t disappear with my discovery, but it seemed to have found its natural course, like a great river once obstructed which now, freed, run gladly towards the sea.

As I traced something that resembled a plan of action with the little information I had, a realization slowly crept into my mind. I had equipped myself very well for that precise situation. Undoubtedly, there was no one better than an (future) investigative reporter to uncover the truth about mysterious notes from supposedly dead people. With a rush of pride and satisfaction, I realized that I had chosen the perfect career to solve the one mystery I was desperate to investigate.

There was something going on in this place, Griffith College. Some mystery flourishing undercover of darkness, some secret kept by the paving stones between the mismatched buildings. And I was going to uncover it.


End file.
